Introduction

There are stories that simply describe a future, and then there are stories that warn us about one. “Coming Attraction” belongs firmly to the second category — a short, ferocious vision of a world that has gone wrong in ways both familiar and strange. First published in the early 1950s, when the dust of one war had barely settled and the shadow of nuclear annihilation hung over every dinner table and newspaper headline, this tale arrives at the reader like a flare fired into a darkened sky. It illuminates briefly, sharply, and unforgettably. And what it reveals is not a comfortable place to dwell, but a place we cannot quite look away from.

The author behind this work, Fritz Leiber, was a writer of remarkable range — a craftsman equally at home in the realms of swords and sorcery, supernatural horror, and the speculative futures of science fiction. He brought to all his work an unusual sensitivity to the textures of fear and desire, an understanding that the things which truly frighten us are rarely monsters in the conventional sense. More often, they are reflections: distortions of ourselves, our appetites, and the societies we build to contain or indulge them. In this particular story, Leiber turns his attention to a New York City that has survived catastrophe only to mutate into something grotesque, a metropolis of glittering luxury laid over a foundation of cruelty, paranoia, and spectacle. The result is a piece of fiction that, decades after its composition, continues to resonate with an uncomfortable accuracy.

This edition presents the work in a modern translation, adapted carefully for the contemporary reader. The language has been smoothed where the idioms of an earlier era might have caused confusion, the references clarified where time has dulled their immediacy, and the rhythm of the prose tuned to the ear of a present-day audience. None of this has been done to diminish the original’s force — quite the opposite. The intention has been to remove the small barriers that can accumulate between a mid-twentieth-century text and a twenty-first-century mind, so that the story’s genuine power can strike without interference. What you hold is meant to feel immediate, as though it were written for you, about a tomorrow that might still be coming.

To enter this story is to step into a city that feels at once seductive and sinister. The future imagined here is not the chrome-and-rocket utopia that so much science fiction of its time loved to celebrate. There are no benevolent scientists guiding humanity toward enlightenment, no gleaming domes of rational progress. Instead, the New York of this narrative is a place where wealth and want exist side by side, where the surface dazzles even as something rots beneath it. The streets are crowded with display, with consumption, with the constant churn of a society that has learned to entertain itself with increasingly elaborate distractions. And underneath that entertainment runs a current of violence so casual, so normalized, that the inhabitants barely seem to notice it anymore.

One of the most striking elements of the world Leiber constructs is the way it treats the human body — particularly the female body — as both an object of obsession and a site of concealment. There is a custom in this future society, a fashion that has hardened into something close to a moral code, in which faces are hidden behind masks. The implications of this single imaginative choice ripple outward through the entire story. A mask can be glamorous, alluring, an instrument of mystery and seduction. It can also be a cage, a shield, a symbol of a culture that has decided certain things must never be seen plainly. Leiber understood that the most disturbing aspects of any society are often the ones its members take entirely for granted, the practices so woven into daily life that no one questions them. The masks in this story function exactly this way. They are everywhere, accepted, even celebrated — and they are, the reader gradually comes to feel, profoundly wrong.

What elevates this vision above mere shock is the precision with which it is rendered. Leiber does not simply tell us that this future is corrupt; he shows us its corruption in a hundred small details. The advertisements, the public amusements, the ways people speak to and about one another, the things they find thrilling and the things they find dull — all of it builds a portrait of a civilization that has lost its moral bearings while retaining, perhaps even intensifying, its capacity for pleasure. This is a world that has confused sensation with meaning, and the confusion has curdled into something dangerous. The luxury named in the book’s subtitle is real, but it is the luxury of a society that has paid for its comforts with its soul. The oppression is equally real, and the most chilling thing about it is how comfortably the two coexist.

There is something almost prophetic in how the story anticipates concerns that would only grow more urgent in the decades following its publication. The blurring of violence and entertainment, the commodification of human appearance, the way public spectacle can both pacify and brutalize a population — these themes were sharp observations in their own time and have only grown sharper since. A reader encountering this work today may find themselves startled by how contemporary it feels, how many of its anxieties have become our own. The future it warns against is, in certain respects, a future we have partially inhabited. This is not to say the story has come true in any literal sense, but rather that its underlying insights about human nature and the seductions of a certain kind of culture have proven remarkably durable.

The setting itself deserves particular attention, because Leiber was a writer who understood place as more than mere backdrop. The city in this story breathes. It has moods, textures, a kind of personality that presses upon the characters and shapes their choices. The architecture of fear is everywhere — in the way people move through public spaces, in the unwritten rules that govern interaction, in the sense that one is always being watched, judged, and potentially preyed upon. This is a metropolis where danger is not an aberration but an ambient condition, something the inhabitants have learned to navigate the way earlier generations learned to navigate weather. And yet, crucially, the city is also alluring. There is a glamour to it, a forbidden excitement, that the prose captures with uncomfortable fidelity. We are meant to feel the pull of this place even as we recoil from it, and that tension — between attraction and revulsion — is one of the story’s most sophisticated achievements.

To fully appreciate what Leiber accomplishes here, it helps to understand the kind of writer he was. He came from a theatrical family — his parents were Shakespearean actors — and he himself spent time on the stage before turning fully to writing. This background is not incidental. There is a deeply theatrical quality to his fiction, an attentiveness to gesture, to the dramatic reveal, to the way a scene can be staged for maximum emotional impact. He knew how to control the reader’s attention the way a director controls an audience’s gaze, guiding the eye, building tension, releasing it at precisely calculated moments. In this story, that theatrical instinct serves him especially well. The narrative is structured almost like a series of scenes, each one ratcheting up the unease, each one pulling back a layer to reveal something more troubling beneath.

Leiber was also a writer of unusual intelligence and breadth. Across his long career, he won virtually every major award the fields of science fiction and fantasy could offer, and he did so writing in modes that ranged from the swashbuckling adventures of his celebrated rogue heroes to the quiet, creeping horror of his urban supernatural tales. He had a particular gift for what might be called the horror of the modern — the recognition that the ancient terrors of ghosts and demons had not vanished in the industrial age but had simply found new forms, new vessels, new ways to inhabit the cities and machines and social arrangements of contemporary life. His fiction frequently explores the idea that civilization itself can become a kind of haunted house, that the structures we build to protect ourselves can turn against us in ways we never anticipated.

In this story, that sensibility is on full display. The future it depicts is not frightening because of any external threat — no aliens invade, no monsters stalk the streets in any literal sense. The horror is internal, social, human. It emerges from the choices people make, the values they embrace, the appetites they indulge. Leiber understood that the most effective kind of dystopian fiction does not need fantastical menaces to be terrifying. It needs only to take recognizable human tendencies and extrapolate them to their logical, awful conclusions. The world of this story is one that human beings made, willingly, through a thousand small decisions, and that is precisely what makes it so disturbing. We can see the road that leads there, and it does not require us to become something inhuman. It requires only that we become more of what we already are.

The prose itself rewards close attention. Leiber wrote with a density and richness that distinguished him from many of his contemporaries in the pulp magazines where so much science fiction of the era first appeared. He cared about language, about rhythm, about the precise word and the telling image. There is a literary quality to his work that has earned him admiration far beyond the boundaries of genre fiction, and it is present here in abundance. The descriptions are vivid without being overwrought; the dialogue crackles with implication; the narrative voice maintains a control that keeps even the most lurid material from tipping into mere sensationalism. This is a writer who trusts his reader, who understands that suggestion is often more powerful than explicit statement, who knows when to show and when to withhold. The modern adaptation presented in this edition has worked carefully to preserve these qualities, to retain the muscularity and elegance of the original voice while making it accessible to readers who may be encountering this style for the first time.

It is worth noting, too, that Leiber was writing in a tradition of social criticism that has always run beneath the surface of the best speculative fiction. The greatest works in this mode have never been content merely to imagine technological marvels or exotic futures; they have used those imagined worlds as mirrors, as instruments for examining the present. When we read about a future society’s flaws, we are really being invited to examine our own. Leiber’s New York is a distorted reflection of the city and the culture he knew, and through that distortion he was able to say things about his own moment that a more straightforward realism might have struggled to articulate. The genre gave him a kind of license, a way to push his observations to their extremes, to make visible the tendencies that polite society preferred to keep hidden. This is one of the enduring functions of science fiction at its best, and few practitioners have understood it more clearly than Leiber.

There is also a thread of psychological insight running through the story that deserves mention. Leiber was deeply interested in the inner lives of his characters — their desires, their fears, their self-deceptions. The narrator of this tale, in particular, is a figure of considerable complexity, an outsider whose perspective allows us to see the strange world he moves through with a kind of double vision. He is both repelled and fascinated, both critical and complicit. Through his eyes, we experience the seductions and the horrors of this future society simultaneously, and we are never allowed the easy comfort of simple moral judgment. Leiber refuses to let us stand entirely outside the story, pointing and condemning. He implicates us, draws us in, makes us feel the pull of the very things we know we ought to resist. This is the mark of genuinely serious fiction, and it is what gives the story its lasting power.